Saturday, November 29, 2008

Sorry, this is a few days after that event, but I’ve been pretty under the weather lately.

This year Jason and I hosted Thanksgiving at our apartment for his family. It was a lot of work to make this feast, but an awesome time, none the less.

We started cooking early. Jason made the cider for my mom’s cider ham Wednesday night. He made more than the recipe called for, so we were able to drink the extra. It was fantastic!

This photo of Jason is at about 6:30 in the morning. He was a little scared to start on the turkey.

You can just barely see the sun coming up over the building. We finished setting up the table in between the turkey and other food preparations.

Since we only have 8 place settings and Ella got her special green plate, fork and spoon.

I made these placecards on the computer. The turkey is the same turkey that we used on the invites.

Jason made these coasters Thursday morning. He did an ink transfer onto basswood squares. Pretty cool, eh? A few of them soaked in a bit too much water and warped, but for a one day use, they worked beautifully.

Thursday morning at 4 a.m., Jason climbed out of bed to put our ham in the crock pot.

We both got up somewhere around 6 a.m. to start the rest of the cooking. This is when we discovered that despite pulling Mabel, our turkey, out of the freezer on Saturday, she was still slightly frozen. We tried to stick her in some water to thaw her a bit more, but since it was our first turkey we were a little nervous. We decided it was time to call for help about 7:30 when we couldn’t figure out how to get Mabel’s feet out of her rump. It took a little bit of work to decide which end was up, but eventually we got it. Mabel went into the oven about 15-20 minutes behind schedule.

These photos are probably 2 hours after Mabel went into the oven. Jason is putting the glaze on her.

Or maybe he'll eat it instead. We're not quite sure.

At some point during the morning, I went for a walk and brought back these branches. I thought it made a neat little arrangement. The Christmas cactus was a gift from Mel (Jason's sister-in-law) that day. Jason’s mom (momba) came over around 10 o’clock to help us cook. She brought her thanksgiving turkey apron. Is this not pure awesomeness?

Everyone else started coming over around 11ish.

We had some munchies sitting out on our sideboard for people to snack on. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures of these before they got eaten on. The deviled eggs weren’t put out until later, so there are quite a few left.

We made a feta and pine-nut roll-up. It was quite tasty. It was garlic and herb feta cheese and pine-nuts rolled up in a pre-made pizza dough. They were quite tasty.

Momba made deviled eggs. I don’t like deviled eggs, but they seemed to be eaten up quickly.

We had some baby carrots with veggie dip.

We couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a cracker tray with some pub cheese and sausage.

I made my Aunt Joanie’s specialty, a cheese log.

Finally, around 2 o’clock it was time to eat the feast!

Mabel turned out to be fantastic. She was done up with a cranberry-orange glaze.

Our ham was the best dish in my opinion. It was so tender and so sweet.

Momba made us some cranberry sauce. It was very tasty.

This is one of Jason’s specialties. His Three-Potato Gratin is fantastic.

The crescent rolls weren’t all that good, but they are very pretty.

Momba also brought two different stuffings. I don’t recall what was in them. I think one had some fruit; maybe peach, but I don’t know about the other.

Our green-bean casserole was delicious as always. My mom got us this casserole dish a while ago. It has the green-bean casserole recipe written on the inside. It’s very cute, but somehow doesn’t work all that well when you put the ingredients in on top of the text without reading it completely.Real mashed-potatoes. Nice and creamy.

Jason made these spiced carrots. They were not kidding on the spiced part of the name.

Everyone is enjoying the meal except for Momba (Jason’s mom) and Ella. Momba got up for something in the kitchen and Ella was taking a nap. Josh (Jason’s brother) seems to be making a goofy face. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a picture of him not making this face.

Luke (our nephew) tried mashed potatoes for the first time. He wasn’t so sure about them.

Terry (Jason’s step-dad) is trying to get Luke to calm down a bit. I think he was probably excited about it being his first Thanksgiving.

Lily liked the ham as long as the sweet stuff was sucked off of it. She prefers Black Forest Ham, though.

Ella is up from her nap in time to catch the tail end of dinner. She came dressed as a pumpkin fairy.

Forgive me for being a poor photographer, but I forgot to take pictures of the deserts before they got cut into as well.

This Bundt cake was amazing. It was a Pumpkin-Spiced Bundt cake with Buttermilk Icing.

This was the best pumpkin pie I’ve ever had. Jason and I made it Wednesday night and then drizzled the third and final chocolate on right before serving. It’s a Triple-Chocolate Pumpkin Pie. It was so rich and creamy.

All in all, it was a good day. We had a lot of fun cooking. I had a lot of fun coming up with how to display the food and how to arrange the apartment to get everyone to fit. We ended up moving Jason’s desk into the living room and moving the couch into our bedroom. We shoved the dining room table against the wall to use as a buffet. Our sideboard was used as the appetizer table.

I had got a pair of gold curtains from the goodwill I was going to cut up and make fabric napkins out of. We decided a while ago that it was more work that what it was worth. So, instead the curtains ended up being tablecloths. You can see one of them on the food buffet. The other went over our coffee table that was used for our beverage table.

It was a lot of fun and I look forward to hosting another holiday soon.